I finally got around to adding a proper wiki category for the blog. My posts going forward about our adventure in wikism will be chronicled under this category.

One the issues I didn't address about our deployment and adoption of the wiki was getting people to update it. I purposely left this off as I struggled with a way to make it happen. We have 20-25 people on our team and it seemed like 6-8 were updating on a regular basis. The problem with this is that the knowledge we need documented was in the other folks.

We use wikimedia's software and they have a very rudimentary way of ranking changes to pages. What we needed was a scoreboard so to speak that would track changes made by people in various ways.

Our primary wiki designer and developer came across a fantastic wiki extension called Contribution Scores. This extension allows you to weight various types of changes and then ranks your contributors. Here's a quick screen shot. I had to blur the actual names, but you can still see the scores.

What this allowed me to do was begin the process of instituting a quota for updates. I set the goal at an hour a day, which if you work in IT is like a lifetime prison sentance for documentation. I knew this wouldn't happen when I set the goal, but I was curious as to see the results. The quota brought the same people updating. No movement. I pushed harder and we got some movement. Now that we've added the contributor page it's off to the races.

There is a saying that is you can't measure it, you can't manage it. This was very true about the wiki deployment and with the contributor extension we have a way of managing it.